He was booed when he played it at Newport, but Dylan's Stratocaster expected to sell for $500,000

WHEN Bob Dylan walked on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar slung around his neck, the crowd went wild. That's wild as in indignant, outraged and angry.

Dylan was the golden boy of the American folk music revival at the time, and folk music meant acoustic music. Electric guitars – to the folk purists at least – were synonymous with pop music and all things commercial. As Dylan and his band launched into a heavily-amplified version of Maggie's Farm, sections of the Newport audience began to boo.

Well-heeled music fans will get a chance to own the guitar that changed music when it goes under the hammer in New York on 6 December. The notorious Fender Stratocaster is expected to fetch about $500,000.

The New York Post reveals that the guitar has spent much of the past 48 years in an attic in New Jersey. Dylan left it on an aircraft a few months after Newport and the plane's pilot, Vic Quinto, held on to it. He gave it to his daughter Dawn Peterson, who kept it in her attic because she thought it was just one of Dylan's electric guitars rather than the electric guitar.

Peterson is set for a nice windfall, because the guitar's case also held handwritten and typed lyrics to five Dylan songs. One was titled The Darkness Of Your Room and went on to become Absolutely Sweet Marie from the 1966 Blonde On Blonde album. The lyric sheets are expected to sell for anywhere up to $30,000 each.